Procrustes Stretched
"intuition and imagination and intelligence"
manipulators?Of course it is not in the interests of manipulators that the manipulated be educated enough to recognize manipulation. Democracy, to function, requires an educated populace.
An educated electorate would never have tolerated the deterioration of American democracy to its present level.
We wonder, therefore, what happens in our society that such a percentage of adults can be so ill instructed. The lamentable level of 'reasoning', 'evaluating', 'debating' demonstrates that a distrust of democracy is justified.
In a society, such as America's, where economic power is considered the highest measure, democratic institutions devolve to carefully controlled oligarchic ones. Thus, even a republican democracy loses its representative sense in the broadest term and becomes representative only of an élite.
They have given us an oligarchy, if they can keep it.